Intel Quark Runs on Roof, Raises Questions

SAN FRANCISCO — An HVAC system on a rooftop in Minneapolis is running Quark, Intel's newest and smallest SoC. If all goes well, Daikin McQuay might someday buy millions of the chips.

Intel announced Quark at its annual developer conference here as its bid to get a jump on the emerging Internet of Things. However, it provided no details on its technical specs or when it will be released, suggesting it is more of a rushed trial balloon than a nailed-down product and strategy.

In a brief encounter after his first IDF keynote, Intel's new chief executive, Brian Krzanich, said Quark is x86 compatible. The chip he showed was made in a 32nm process, he added.

In his keynote, Krzanich described Quark as a fifth the size and a tenth the power consumption of Atom. It's a synthesizable core Intel will let others use along with third-party silicon blocks in SoCs Intel will make.

Designers will not be allowed to customize the Quark core. They can only connect third-party blocks to its fabric. Intel will allow some process tweaks for some customers, he added.

Last week, HVAC giant Daikin got one industrial reference board using a Quark chip and including WiFi and 3G support. Kevin Facinelli, executive vice president for operations at the company, dialed into the board from the IDF event here to show it is working.

"We looked at Freescale and ARM too but decided on using Quark," Facinelli said.

The mechanical engineering company was not concerned about relative silicon performance. It just wanted to offer a remote maintenance capability with high security.

Security software gave Intel the edge over ARM. The Quark reference board runs a stack of white-listed Wind River embedded operating system supplemented with McAfee security software, the kind of embedded system stack Intel has been touting for embedded systems for more than a year.

Considering the only requirements we know from the article was "to offer a remote maintenance capability with high security." it's rather far fetched to claim a "poor technical decision" as you maintain. There are lots of reasons, besides the level of security provided, which would come into play in the decision by Daikin; think ease of use, maintainability, support, etc.

Using your reference design for a tablet with military grade security is not revalent as this is not a tablet, not needing to meet military anything, and only "high security."

And, no, I'm not associated with Intel, Freescale, ARM, or anyone else; I'm a retired engineer with well over thirty years experience designing embedded systems.

The 80376 was replaced by the 80386EX, which still kept the static core capable uf running at low clock speeds all the way down to halt to save power. But it also kept the 26-bit addressing, so wouldn't be appropriate for re-implementing at a smaller process size without a major update. But I do think it is probably a shrunken older core. I chose the P54C because it has already been worked on for the Single-chip Cloud Computer project and Larrabee.

It seems to me that it would make sense to strip off legacy support in a product like this. Why carry along MS-DOS compatability and segmented memory models when they are competing with ARMs that have a much cleaner architecture? The x86 has been overdue for cleaning out the attic for quite a while. Does anyone know if that is what they are doing here?

Happy to hear that this tiny chip could give 486, Pentium kind of performance, that would be great!! Will this be somewhere close to the SoC launched by AMD recently: G-series SoC? Probably having lower performance and features than that?

The part that scares me is "...suggesting it is more of a rushed trial balloon than a nailed-down product and strategy."

I would dare not think about using it if there are no clear strategy and a clear road-map. Any tentative timeline announced for its release?

I will be very much interested to hear this. Some of the Cortex M devices are reaching this level of performance. If Intel comes down this far, and QFN/QFP packages are available, I could see this being a possible device that a hobbiest could use. I will be very interested to see more about this device.